In the Open Source Project Lounge in Hall 2 of this year's CeBIT, the developers of BIND 10 presented a preview of the upcoming version of the nameserver and are looking for a contact to the community.

BIND 10 should replace the 10-year-old BIND 9, which BIND developers say constitutes 80 percent of all DNS servers. The anticipated BIND 10 new features should include better cluster capabilities. The server will not only run in a cluster, as many users are already running scripts to accomplish, but it should have a management interface for communication within the cluster.

The developers are also planning a generic interface for file storage whereby files, SQL databases, and other alternatives can connect. BIND 10 should thus be able to serve large registries with millions of entries or ISPs with many small zones, as program manager Shane Kerr explained to Linux Magazine Online. In the longer view, BIND 10 should include a complete rework of the DNSSEC security protocol.

BIND 10's development is under the non-profit Internet Systems Consortium's (ISC's) watchful eye; however, whereas BIND 9 was mainly the work of ISC developers, BIND 10 is more directed as a community project and, therefore, on a broader know-how basis. The ISC set up a project page with a wiki, repository access, and bugtracker expressly for the purpose. The first release should have a technology preview around March 19, 2010 that will show the results of BIND 10's first year of work. The first production version should be available in 2012.

Among the sponsors are country registries such as for Japan, Canada, and Germany; however, the project is also requesting support from other areas, to generate a product that will satisfy as many needs as possible. The server is written in C++ in certain performance-critical parts and in Python. Source code is under BSD licensing. Shane Kerr and his colleagues are ever present at CeBIT Open Source in Hall 2 of the Project Lounge.

Related content

Admins have waited all of five years for the 10th major release of the Bind name server, which appeared at the end of March this year. The latest release is a complete rewrite of the DNS server, with a modular design and new configuration tools, but is it ready for business?

After 10 years the industry-independent Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) is embarking on a completely new BIND implementation with BIND 10. Its patrons and sponsors should ensure that the market leader in DNS implementation is more secure, flexible and highly scalable, although developers are keeping the details close to their chests at present.

Much more working memory, Flash drives instead of conventional hard disks, and physically partitioning multiprocessor systems. These are some of the new features of IBM's fifth generation of x86 architecture: eX5 servers.